TWO VIEWS OF REALITY

This week's laugh in the news is Nuttin-honey-yahoo scheduled to speak to Congress, the cement-heads this side of the Atlantic, bypassing presidential approval. Another news ruse scripted by the Heritage Foundation. Some of the democrats are saying they won't go. Nuttin-yahoo won't show for sure. Three billion a year for military at stake, Mr Nutty will not take the risk. Who cares if he does? We the people are so separated from our government, concerns we have bear no meaning. We are given ruse news by way of corporate control, creation, and production of the ongoing serial of the worst things that happen around the globe in the course of a day. The journalist's creed, if it bleeds it leads, is predictable. And conflict, the stuff of drama. No time left for anything else. It takes gunshots and explosions to keep hands off the remotes. Why do I want to fill my head with the worst events of the day from around the world? It's called keeping up with the real world. Whatever that means. It means my life here at home and the lives of the people around me are not real. What's real is conflict someplace else, much of it created for the news. Reality is always someplace else. It is never where I am. I live in the non-existent working class world unheard of on the news and unacknowledged by government, except as the criminal class. It's either the 1% or the middle class. The talk is of the sinking middle class. Every time I hear it, I think, the working class already sank, been sunk throughout my lifetime. People of the working class are taken advantage of for their modest educations, easy targets for propaganda, guided with a ring in the nose away from their own interests, don't even know what their interests might be.  

I'm happy to report, attention I give to the news is waning fast. I turn it on for five minutes, top of the hour, NPR, a time or two a day. Not that I think NPR is better than the others. It's absence of commercials appeals. I'd rather read the cartoon page of any newspaper than the front page stories. Editorial cartoons are about all I care to see on the editorial pages. It takes a certain kind of clever wit to conceive editorial cartoons. When I had my first computer, discovering the internet, I found sites of editorial cartoons, looked at thousands of them. To tell a story in one picture and a few words comes from a certain kind of thinking I don't have. It's a beautiful art form, concise and clear as a Zen haiku. Sitting at the coffee shop I'll pick up the paper and look at the editorial cartoons, go to the cartoon pages and work the Jumble puzzle. Much more interesting than reading something about what somebody supposes Russia is doing in the Ukraine, WW3 in embryo, or conjecture why Seattle didn't run the ball when they had a human tank. Whatever. I've seen a quote attributed to Mark Twain saying America has wars for geography lessons. This leads me to believe our government was attacking poverty-stricken defenseless countries in his time too. Like whoever heard of Vietnam before USA set out to annihilate its people. Fear of communism. Now we're doing fear of terrorism. Then, our troops were killing slopes and dinks. Now they kill towel-heads, steeping impoverished countries in ongoing war to keep the oil corporations flourishing and American "defense" contractors in the right country clubs. Closer to home, when an interstate route is planned through a city, it goes through the neighborhoods of black and working class white, the people without recourse.

   
Talking with an aunt living in Florida on the telephone a decade or more ago, she asked if I'd heard about Conway Twitty dying that day. I had not yet heard the news. She let me have it for not living in the real world. I was told I need to get out of these mountains and back in the real world. Real world? Conway Twitty? Television? City? What I hear and read in the ruse news tells me the "real world" is evidently the world of media and malls, commercials, the world of money. In this "real world," value amounts to money and money only, like getting a great value at a close-out sale, 50% off, or buying a new car at three thousand dollars off the showroom price. Wow, really saved some money. Saved money by spending twenty thousand. I love the enigma of how I can save by spending money. I get junk mail telling me to throw my money their way for something discounted 10%, and save money. These were the questions that made me crazy in transition from sheltered by parents to figuring out how to be an adult by trial and error. I continue to have a hard time in this "real world" making out what the reality might be behind the deceptive front, whatever that may be, last week immigration, this week immunization. One is about keeping poor people out of the country and the other about killing poor people already in the country to get them out of the way. In that "real world" we have War on Poverty, which increased poverty, and War on Drugs, which increased distribution and funded much of it. These wars on, fill in the blank, criminalize the American people. Now we have police state regarding all of us criminals. This is hard to live with. Real world? I lost faith in the world of commerce as the real world before I withdrew self from the real world to what is evidently known by way of media to be the unreal world.

I looked at the window and saw Jenny with her back end pointing this direction. She raised her tail, opened her back legs and let go an astonishing stream of donkey urine. I thought: what a bladder. She was ready to drop some biscuits when Jack wanted to play neck-wrestle, Jenny preoccupied. She let her tail down and took a few steps toward the meadow. Jack stepped to the spot she'd wet, sniffed and sniffed. He raised his head to the sky with curled upper lip in a kind of goosebump spasm. Jenny walked on into the meadow to graze on the day's hay. Jack watched her, then walked behind her to join her grazing. This is where I find the real world. Out another window, buntings and snowbirds pick up sunflower seeds I threw on the ground for them. A chipmunk fills its cheeks. A red squirrel sits up holding a seed with tiny fingers, biting open the shell for the kernel inside. My real world is about people living their lives, working, having opinions, beliefs, doing what they can to get by the best they know how. My real world is knowing donkeys as conscious beings with minds. My world has no value in the world of commerce I've come to call the unreal world. In that world it is not important who a human being is, or any other conscious entity. Learning the doctor I went to for thirty-five years did not know me at all, it told me he was from the world "out there," the unreal world where who someone is bears no relevance, none whatsoever. The doctor I go to now is from my idea of the real world. He is interested in his own humanity and the humanity of others. He is also interested in lab reports and readings on an EKG or MRI. First doctor told me years ago, "We are chemical machines." My Pee Wee Herman within thought, I know you are, but what am I? I knew he would not get the reference, and thought, A doctor telling me I'm a machine? He lost a great deal of credibility. I understood what he was saying. I had a problem with consciousness left out. He told me I'm a what, not a who, a meat-coated skeleton, a file number.

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WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD

jean arp

I heard again a few days ago someone mention in passing about returning to work Monday morning, "Back to the real world." I thought: how many times have I heard this expression and used it, myself, unconsciously? Something to say never examined because it sounds right. The first time it struck me when I was using the expression, I questioned, why is my life the "unreal" world and the world of commerce the "real" world? Upon a hundredth of a second's thought, I saw the saying twisted around from the actual meaning of what we're saying. In the past I'd think of a trip to town for work or paying bills, anything, as reentering the real world. Back to the real world. Cities have unconsciously come to be thought of as the real world, the world that matters. It's the world of generating money. Everything that's done has money for its motivation. I've been told several times of staying on my mountain too much that I need to get back in the real world. An aunt told me on the phone with dramatic urgency on the day Conway Twitty died, when I confessed I did not know he died that day, I need to get out of the mountains and back in the real world. She lost a great deal of credibility in that moment. It wasn't because she said it, but I was told so vehemently to start watching television, pay attention to what's going on in the real world. On my end of the phone, I was stunned, actually. I didn't realize she was so limited. Television? Real world? I don't care if you believe it, but stay out of my face with it. I have thought about why I don't watch tv and why I am in the mountains, thought about it before I left the city. I don't watch tv with purpose. I've thought about it. I'm here with purpose, not just passing through with a surfboard on the roof of my car. Family, extended family, and others from the first half of my life are unable to find in their own minds my motivation to live in Wrong Turn, North Carolina. I could explain, but it takes more than a phrase, and the times I attempted to explain, it put them to sleep after just a few sentences. Their eyes glaze over and I see they're off someplace else, can't follow it. No visuals, no commercials, no flash. Nothing but acoustic audio; doesn't sound right when it's not complaining. 

jean arp

I felt like it was an important discovery for my interior life. I do not see giving carrots to donkeys unreal, or having a friend relationship with donkeys, hearing the birds, the crows, reading, listening to music, making art objects, trees all around, sky and clouds, sun and moon, Caterpillar, my friends. It's a benign, happy world where I don't possess or control anyone but myself the best I'm able. My attitude toward buying the donkeys was buying them out of slavery. They had economic purpose alone in a herd of cattle to keep coyotes from killing the calves. I give them a life in a meadow of their own where they can have a love relationship without interruption of one being taken away never to be seen again by surprise. I hear in my head Jenny singing to Jack as Nina Simone, I loves you Donkey, don't let em take me, don't let em handle me and drive me mad...I'd like to stay here with you forever. I do not think this is the unreal world in what we mean when we divide our subjective selves from the objective world of commerce indifferent as the ocean. I do not consider the indifference to the human spirit, characteristic of the world of commerce, to be real. It's about money. What is more unreal than money? The multi-billionaires have bought our government rendering us without democracy and without recourse. They are the unreal people, people who intend to reenact an Ayn Rand novel at the expense of everyone else whose resources these people have drained to give themselves power to turn American life into the Rand/Reagan ideal, Masters and Slaves. It's working for them. I do not call that real thinking or real action. It's as unreal as a John Wayne movie, and so without conscience I'd call it criminal, destructive to so many lives, unto the life of civilization's vanguard democracy. We have been conquered from within, tricked by the American character itself, lust for money. Spinning wheel, round and round. It looks like it's time for the American people to do without and learn to live in Third World poverty. The Reagan Revolution worked. They made it work using racism. 

jean arp

The unreal world is a world without love, without compassion, without empathy. Television keeps the economy flowing with commercials generating money by way of sophisticated mind control, eroding our decency toward one another. Two-thirds of a century after television became the shrine in every American home, Xtreme craziness is popping up everywhere. What's causing this? Why is it so copycat to shoot up a shopping center or a school or a McDonalds or anywhere? Or for cops to shoot unarmed young black men? There's an old country saying, It's the weakest link in the chain that breaks. We have weak links popping everywhere. Must be a time of high stress. Noise, distraction, interruption. This is the unreal world. I'm not giving up my donkey meadow, my home on a mountain I love, the community I love, to go live in trailer park poverty in some horrid city where hostile attitudes permeate the air. To watch television and be in the "real" world? I think I'll stay on my mountain and not watch tv. I have several years experience of the inner peace of living without tv, by choice, on Waterfall Road. I also have several years experience in the world of commerce, the world of town and city. At home on Waterfall Road I am  in my subjective world where love flows around here, compassion. All the green around the house has come up of its own volition, volunteered. I asked the ground what it wanted and it told me it would like to go back to trees. I said, Good, that's in accord with what I want. To get all the more subjective, the mountain once told me it appreciates me living on it, because I respect it. This spot had the topsoil bulldozed away to make a flat area to put up a little house. I've been allowing topsoil to grow over the years, leaves decompose from year to year like in the woods, fertilizing the roots, encouraging worms, wild violets, jewelweed, ferns. I put donkey droppings around the rhododendron and their change to more vibrant is visible. I'm satisfied that after more than 35 years I've restored topsoil to this spot that is in my care. Birds, chipmunks, squirrels, donkeys are at home here. They don't need to invade my house because I give them enough sunflower seeds to squirrel away for winter. I see them with their cheeks full and say, Take as many as you can get; winters are cold and long.  

jean arp

Donkey Jenny stands by the gate, a place she likes to stand, a comfortable place for her. In the time of day they take a siesta, time out from grazing, Jack likes inside the shed and Jenny likes the shade by the gate for meditation parallel with the fence, switching her tail, stamping a back foot to shake off a fly. Baby Vada a-wallerin me on the couch, my hands and arms her bumpers, her safety net between bouncing on the couch and the floor. Vada's daddy telling me about a new arrow tip that he described "wicked" with a little horror emphasis. They are six for thirty-five dollars. "It will be worth thirty-five dollars to see what they do." I'll spare you the mental image of what it does. He's wanting a bear. I pray for the bear. He kills deer throughout the hunting season. I send their souls on to the next life with silent prayer. His family eats them and he kills them instantly. I have to applaud that. Absence of adrenaline in the blood, a natural life and a natural diet. It's not meat found at Walmart from cows with cancer. He can feel good that his kids are being raised on real food, not the chemical cocktails that go with corporate feed lots where the cows eat from troughs, stand in shit to their knees. Animals hate standing in shit. They don't like to step in it either. In a meadow of cows you don't see hoof prints in the cowpies. The four-leggeds tend to be scrupulously clean, and birds, even snakes and bugs. It makes me glad for his family that he gives them healthy meat instead of poison meat. This is my real world, the people I know, the critters of my neighborhood. The sounds in the air I hear as music, not noise of a thousand mufflers, tire tread roar, rice rockets, Harleys. I'm getting awfully rural romantic and have no problem with it. I'll take the world of trees, a quiet life, interaction with the landscape I live in, living spirits in life forms. People in the city I find guarded, defensive, and sometimes a sinister edge. From individual to individual, it seems like in this time we are each one our own culture, even our own country. I like to be around other people one on one, not several at a time. This is my real world.

jean arp

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